Although she could not have known it at the time, July 29, 2006, turned out to be a very big day for Michelle Wie. It was her last good round of golf.

On that Sunday afternoon in Haute-Savoie, near the French border with Switzerland, Wie had a round of 68 to tie for second place in the Evian Masters, behind Karrie Webb, the winner. She has not broken par since. “It is not a fun time, really,” she said on leaving the McDonald’s LPGA Championship last week.

A year ago, she was tied fifth in the event; in 2005 she came second. This year, she departed last of the 84 players who made the cut, 21 over par and 35 strokes off the lead.

Golf is a sport in which statistics never lie and Wie is being beaten into the ground by hers. At her previous tournament, the Ginn Tribute in South Carolina, she retired claiming injury when 14 over par after 16 holes of the first round, perilously close to the score of 88 that, as a nonTour player (more of which later), would have barred her from LPGA events for the remainder of the season. Her critics were not amused.

Wie had been advised to withdraw by her manager, Greg Nared, it was claimed, amid accusations that she had received tactical guidance from her father, B. J., on one particularly disastrous hole (advice by any third party except the player’s caddie is forbidden). Her playing partners were suspicious of the injured wrist excuse, even more so when she arrived to practise at her next tournament two days later (which would not have been allowed had she been a fully fledged member of the Tour).

The fiasco has contributed to an air of malevolence swirling around a young girl who is still at school. The hapless Wie does not attract the widespread ire that sent Paris Hilton back to jail at the end of last week, but among followers of golf, it is getting there.

Hating Michelle is quite hot right now. When it was announced that she had accepted another sponsor’s exemption to compete against men in the John Deere Classic, the messageboards fizzled with vitriol and disapproval. It will be her third appearance at the tournament; her second appearance ended in debacle when she withdrew claiming heat-stroke while ten strokes shy of the projected cut-line.

Some of the brickbats come from those who would gladly take the sport back to its days as a preserve of the white, middle-class male and are easily dismissed. Yet, increasingly, Wie is also seen to represent corporate America’s soulless invasion of sport. She can command $1.5 million (about £760,000) in appearance money, despite never having won a professional tournament and is backed to the tune of $10 million annually by her sponsors, Nike, Sony and Omega.

Wie is regularly inserted into an event by a multinational patron and, in the past year, often without merit. If her presence was controversial when she was at a peak, now she is in tailspin it is the embodiment of the corruption of sport’s ethos. At the European Masters last summer, Wie collected £135,000 appearance money and finished last, 15 over par, while her playing partners, Nick Dougherty and Gonzalo Fernández-Castaño, suffered terribly as a gallery every bit as raw as their heroine (who once grounded a club in a bunker at a tournament and later claimed that she did not know it was illegal) trampled fairways and talked noisily on mobile phones at inappropriate moments.

The sponsor, Omega, cared not. Wie’s presence had made its tournament in Crans-sur-Sierre, Switzerland, a big commercial success. Who cared if she was the worst golfer there? And that is the heart of the matter. If modern sport is merely an extension of the dreams of the marketing department, Wie is its pin-up. If it is about achievement, advancement, triumph and glory, she is a teenage tragedy in the making.

It must have been hard to turn the marvel Wie into a bad golfer, but somehow her advisers have managed it. Her career has been marshalled by the sprawling William Morris Agency (whose client roster includes everyone from Eminem to Dame Julie Andrews), first by Ross Berlin, who left for a job on the PGA Tour of the United States last year, and more recently by Nared, who spent 15 years at Nike, including eight as business affairs manager to Tiger Woods.

Reports of Nared’s influence vary, with some saying that he was no more than a gofer, whose remit stretched little beyond telling Woods which red shirt the company wanted him to wear for the final round and making sure that his new golf shoes were delivered to the locker-room on time. Maybe this undervalues Nared, but what is plain is that the client he took on in Wie was damaged goods and harmed, perhaps irreparably, by a succession of career choices that have contrived to turn one of the most remarkable golfers of the modern era into a shadow of that self, and all before her 18th birthday.

Until she turns 18, in October, Wie is limited to six LPGA events each year, plus unlimited nonLPGA professional events. This is often generously advanced as the reason she is forced to compete in men’s tournaments, yet Morgan Pressel – the youngest winner of an LPGA event at 18 years and 313 days – and Aree Song, a young South Korean, have appealed against this ruling in recent years and been granted exemptions. Wie’s career path is without doubt commercially motivated, deliberately setting her apart from the rest of the tour.

The little girl who takes on the big boys must have seemed a unique selling point to the guys at WMA’s head office on the Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York, but as Trish Johnson, victorious in 18 tournaments on the Ladies European Tour, pointed out early in Wie’s career: winners stay winners by winning, not by just getting in.

Too much of Wie’s career has been wasted at events when being present on Saturday would be the achievement. There is no longer any mileage in the debate about whether Wie’s golf has suffered as a result. From February 2006, she put together a run of results that read: third, tied third, tied 35th, tied fifth, tied third, tied fifth. Only the 35th-placed finish came in a men’s tournament. Her record from last year’s European Masters to the present day is: missed cut, missed cut, seventeenth, missed cut, missed cut, withdrew on 14 over par, 84th. In that run, Wie played four men’s events. So not only is she losing her capability to compete against men, it is affecting her performance against women.

Those who remember her arrival on the circuit say that they barely recognise the player now. Her height and her fluent swing gave her amazing length and accuracy, so that at 16 her standard driving distance was a man-sized 280 yards. At that time the average course length on the LPGA Tour was 6,200 yards, compared with 7,400 for the men’s major events; but once on the men’s tour, even cherry-picking events, her greatest strength was negated and her short game failed to hold up. Her scoring deteriorated, but it scarcely mattered as she drew the crowds and the money kept coming.

Yet all the time the competitor inside must have been dying. At the Ginn Tribute, before retiring hurt, Wie drove so wildly from the tee of the par-five 3rd that her ball hit a parked car and rebounded down a storm drain. Returning to the tee, she hooked spectacularly left into a swamp. She finally got down in ten. At her most recent event, the LPGA Championship, the burden of so many truncated tournaments was plain. Squeaking inside the cut, she played a third round in a competition for the first time since mid-October. The result: 83.

“It shows me who I really trust,” Wie said, reacting to the negative publicity that has dogged her since the Ginn Tribute exit. The irony being that if it is her advisers and guardians she turns to for guidance, it could equally be argued that they are most responsible for this crisis.

Wie’s tale would end in tears, the critics predicted. It is wrong to sell out the principles of golf to advance the commercial exploitation of a schoolgirl. And, yes, this is a girl thing, despite any attempt to place Wie on the front line of a grown-up battle of the sexes.

The outstanding sporty teenager whose choices are made by overbearing (male) adults is a peculiarly female phenomenon. We are familiar with the concept of the tennis dad. Yet where are the men’s circuit equivalents of Jim Pierce, Stefano Capriati, Damir Dokic or Marinko Lucic? Jennifer Capriati was a professional tennis player at 13, an Olympic gold medal-winner at 16 and a police mugshot at 18. The day she was charged with possession of marijuana, many thought there should have been others beside her in the dock, standing accused of stealing a childhood.

As for Wie, perhaps it is a simple case of mistaken identity. She is a 17-year-old about to go to Stanford University; her advisers think she is a walking ATM machine.

Meanwhile, amid the many online entries charting a rise and fall of such velocity that it makes the world of preteen pop music appear constant, there is a site of Wie’s own. “You’ve reached the online home for Michelle Wie,” it announces. “Your source for golf, lifestyle and more.” And, beneath, a box to tick and an unintentionally poignant message for those who are still interested in this sad little vignette. “Please e-mail me when the full site launches,” it reads. Yes, please do.